Ways and Means of Meditation

Three people have written to me recently, independently of each other, about what they regard as a ‘Zen’ or meditative quality of this daily ‘practice’ – the ritual or practice of painting the sunset. One person, an art consultant and Buddhist, expressed surprise that I’m not Buddhist. Another, someone I lived with when we were in our early 20s, wrote, “In Zen they say that the Universe is Scripture, and I sense that it is much the same for you.” A fellow artist now says, “Making a commitment to loyally paint the everchanging sky ... somehow reminds me of the Tibetan monks and their intricate sand mandalas.” 

These three friends make me realize, first of all, how much I have yet to learn about what I’m doing. An interesting thing for me is that I never thought about it in anything like these terms. I feel an affinity with eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, but have never felt drawn toward formal study or exploration. I’ve never even read my age- and peer-group’s required Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, although, like just about everybody else, I have a copy somewhere. I’m not sure which deterred me more, the ‘Zen’ part or the ‘motorcycle maintenance’ part. (I’ve always been mechanically challenged.)

Yet I realize there has always been what might be called a meditative center to my experience, a homemade, routine sort of meditation without a system or a name. 

Lately I’ve been writing in these posts about having to cut more firewood at the end of the day, and this has been going on pretty much every day in fact. (It happens late because most of the day is spent working toward an editorial deadline.) What I realized, standing next to some dead tree and watching the sky approach sunset, is the ‘Zen’ state that can sometimes be produced by sheer physical exhaustion. Maybe that’s part of the reason for the physical labors of certain Buddhist monks – I don’t know.

I found myself thinking of a painting that used to be popular as a print, “The Song of the Lark,” done in 1884 by the French artist Jules Breton. The image is now in the public domain:

Some people would probably say it shows a peasant woman transported at sunset by a bird’s song in spite of her physical exhaustion. From my own experience, I would suppose it shows someone transported because of their exhaustion – because, in that state, you can easily find yourself drained of all thought and wide open, with no defenses against the beautiful world everywhere around you.

I wrote about this sort of thing almost exactly 15 years ago, without realizing that’s what I was writing about. I hope you’ll cut me some slack – I was a mere kid of 46 (and I mean that quite seriously). The style, I now realize, was somewhat like a chant belonging to the state of being either too tired or too absorbed to stop a sentence and start a new one.

February clouds, streaks of water-blue in among them, the sun suffusing down, winter turning warm finds me on my knees in the woods, chain saw quiet and resting, I’m looking up through the brown and green vines, through the network of fallen cedar branches and logs that nearly has me trapped, I’m tired and it’s difficult to move, while the sun and its light falling through the woods turns me silent, saturated, I have no words as I look back up along the avenues of light coming down, along the golds, browns, greens, branches dead and alive, buds, gray cedar bones, gray brushes of dead cedar needles, briars of every kind that have torn my jacket apart, the ground and my knees wet, the air becoming soft, and I’m suffusing into the light of the woods, into the woods themselves, until I know I have become invisible, someone looking into this little hollow beyond the vine-covered humped barriers of turned-up cedar roots would not see me, unless they were another native looking for the part of the woods that resembles a person who has become the woods. Without moving I move easily because I am everywhere I see, although I don’t see so much as refrain from seeing, from looking, I am absolutely absently gazing at all that is and is not me, so many vines, so much light moving and becoming woods. Sun becomes light, light becomes woods, woods become me. I become the woods, the light, and the sun shining back through the circuit of light.

Sunset, Friday, 19 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Sunset, Thursday, 18 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Watching this sunset, I realized I could paraphrase The Beatles. It says good-bye, and I say hello.

Sunset, Wednesday, 17 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

The air was cold, the fields still securely clamped in snow, and even the colors had something of a typical cold drained winter evening about them, but a few clouds looked suspiciously like banners of spring.

Sunset, Tuesday, 16 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Cutting wood (again! – one of the drawbacks of renting an uninsulated farmhouse) in the hour before sunset, I was watching an ever bigger and more golden sun drop through the clouds and thinking – oddly enough, for the first time – about the difference, if there is one, between painting space (a scene, a person, a thing) and painting time (like the sunset).

I looked away from the sun and noticed, down a narrow park-like draw that forms a stream and leads into the woods, that most of a cedar had been broken in two by the snows – one tall half of the canopy lay to the left of a shattered remaining ten feet of trunk, and the other side, just as tall, had fallen to the right.

The snow split the tree. The sun split day and night. And I still couldn’t articulate the difference, if there is one, between painting space and painting time.

Sunset, Monday, 15 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Snow here since noon, around an inch and a half of new snow, and it just started to lift at sunset. A momentary band of light or of brighter cloud in the west surprised me. After a day so enveloped in white and gray, the color of the light seemed about as exotic as the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.